Today's Stichomancy for Karl Rove

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Euthyphro by Plato:

applied to the gods as when applied to other things. For instance, horses are said to require attention, and not every person is able to attend to them, but only a person skilled in horsemanship. Is it not so?

EUTHYPHRO: Certainly.

SOCRATES: I should suppose that the art of horsemanship is the art of attending to horses?

EUTHYPHRO: Yes.

SOCRATES: Nor is every one qualified to attend to dogs, but only the huntsman?

EUTHYPHRO: True.

SOCRATES: And I should also conceive that the art of the huntsman is the

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac:

say the English have discovered a mode of treating the disease with prussic acid--"

At that instant a still more piercing cry echoed through the house, and froze us with horror.

"There! that is what I listened to all day long last year," said the banker's wife. "It made me jump in my chair and rasped my nerves dreadfully. But, strange to say, poor Taillefer, though he suffers untold agony, is in no danger of dying. He eats and drinks as well as ever during even short cessations of the pain--nature is so queer! A German doctor told him it was a form of gout in the head, and that agrees with Brousson's opinion."

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

The man of the time and the place, whatever The time or the place might be. Were he sounding, With a genial craft that cloaked its purpose, Nigh to itself, the depth of a woman Fooled with his brainless art, or sending The midnight home with songs and bottles, -- The cad was there, and his ease forever Shone with the smooth and slippery polish That tells the snake. That night he drifted Into an up-town haunt and ordered -- Whatever it was -- with a soft assurance

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from King Lear by William Shakespeare:

Fool. Winter's not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way.

Fathers that wear rags Do make their children blind; But fathers that bear bags Shall see their children kind. Fortune, that arrant whore, Ne'er turns the key to th' poor.

But for all this, thou shalt have as many dolours for thy daughters as thou canst tell in a year. Lear. O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio! Down, thou climbing sorrow!

King Lear